It's worth keeping in mind, in the context of police complaints about underfunding in the article, that the LAPD's budget is literally more than 50% of LA's entire city budget. They have nearly 10,000 officers.
Are you sure LAPD is >50% of taxes paid by LA residents? Or is it just >50% of the budget of some taxing body that is essentially just "police, fire, and sewers"?
It would be pretty shocking if LAPD was actually 50% of all Los Angeles spending. It seems pretty unlikely. Compare "Los Angeles public schools budget" to "LAPD budget" in search results.
My understanding is that if you include non-discretionary spending (pensions etc) that number goes up significantly.
There is something deeply weird about finding the one taxing body in a municipality that is responsible for funding the police and then freaking out at what a big chunk of that taxing body's budget the police are. It's like complaining that parks are almost 100% of the parks department budget.
It's entirely possible that LA spends way too much on LAPD. You can demonstrate that by absolute dollars, by dollars spent per capita, or by a percentage of all tax dollars spent on policing. You probably† can't reasonably do it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of a single taxing body.
† (There might be a city where you can do that; I don't think Los Angeles is one of them).
I'd be surprised if schools weren't the most expensive thing in Los Angeles. They are everywhere else I've looked.
Again: none of this is to say that LAPD can't be overfunded. It absolutely can be. You might even be able to demonstrate it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of the city general fund... over time. But you can't do a single point measurement of LAPD's allocation from the general fund and use it as a comparative metric. That's incoherent.
I'm stuck on this because it comes up over and over again in police reform discussions, and reformers/defunders/abolitionists (I'd call myself the first of those, I guess) keep making cringeworthy innumerate arguments. I'm just across the street from Chicago in a village with just 50,000 people, and even here people make the same mistake, trying to look at the village budget in isolation --- it sounds right! Just like "the Los Angeles city budget" sounds like the thing you want to look at! But it's just not.
If you want to boil the current funding in a city down to one number, though, I don't think there's an obviously better one. You can add the school district and utility district to the denominator, the school district police to the numerator, the county sheriffs to both, etc, but you'll have to draw a line somewhere and there's likely to be some arbitrariness. Where do you put the DA's office? How do you think about tax funds which are funneled up to the state and feds but then back down in more or less localized ways (including e.g. grants to police or other city programs)? How do you think about payments on one-off referendum-authorized bonds, or the Port of Los Angeles budget? Maybe you could show me that all of these questions have either clearly right answers or don't affect the numbers enough to matter, but extrapolating from what I remember from spending some time digging into the Oakland budget a few years ago, I'm skeptical.
the Los angeles Police is 1.9b of a 4.9b departmental operational city budget, but there are 600m appropriations and 6.2b non departmental that are in other areas, that aren't terribly clear. So if you have 1.9b of a 11.7b budget, that about 16%.
It looks like property tax accounts for the largest chunk of revenues--20%--but keep in mind that property tax usually fund school districts and county covernment as well (here in NM something like 90% of county budget is property tax.)
So yes, at any place you happen to live your taxes and other governmental fees can easily go to a number of different entities, so while it may be true that LAPD accounts for 16% of the LA budget, it amounts to a much smaller percentage of the taxes you pay.
(Its also possible that the LAPD budget receives funding from other sources and is not accounted in the 1.9b above.)
In many states the speed limits are being lowered well below reasonable levels and speed cameras are deployed to opportunistically capitalize on citizens, rather than deploying officers on streets to monitor for other offenses that go unchecked... The worst part still being that we're paying outrageously high income and other taxes. Eventually people will start to ask what the purpose of high taxes are for, and why becoming a police officer is more and more of a desk job than being on streets.
You have a citation for this? A quick google reveals LA’s city budget to be 11.8bn while LAPD budget is around 2bn
In fact NYC rents them out to other countries